A tidy profit at public expense

From today’s editorials: The generous reimbursements state lawmakers receive for food and lodging in Albany smack of padding their expenses.

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With a base salary of $79,500 a year, the pay for a New York legislator is hardly shabby. Not extravagant, but certainly better than average.

We thought of that average when we saw what some lawmakers bill the state for personal expenses. It turns out that what some New Yorkers struggle just to earn, some legislators charge taxpayers just to show up for work.

Earlene Hooper, for instance, racked up $41,680 last year in expenses. That, on top of the $104,500 she made between her legislative salary and $25,000 stipend as deputy Assembly speaker — compensation that’s more than twice the average household income in New York of about $51,000.

The Long Island lawmaker led the Legislature’s top expensers largely with the help of per diems — the daily allowance of $160 for lodging and meals — for the 249 days she reported being in Albany. That compensation, by the way, went up to $171 this year, automatically rising with the federal rate.

Seven other Assembly members and senators topped $30,000 in expenses last year. Plenty of other lawmakers surpassed $20,000. In all, taxpayers paid a little over $4 million to house, feed and get their state lawmakers to and from Albany in 2009.

We don’t begrudge lawmakers fair compensation for costs they incur in doing their jobs.
They shouldn’t have to pay to serve the public.

But this has all the feel of an institutionalized padding of lawmakers’ expense accounts.

The per diem payments, for instance, assume one is spending as much as $110 a night on a hotel. Fedrooms, an Internet service for federal employees, lists plenty of hotels with government rates far below that price. One hotel even offers a “Pocket your per diem special” that includes a free dinner — a dinner the per diem is expected to help cover. Free dinner? Money in the bank.

The per diems are particularly generous if you consider that some lawmakers, such as Shirley Huntley of Queens, rent apartments. A few per diems and the rent is paid. The rest is gravy.
Over the years, too, some lawmakers have bought real estate in Albany. Have taxpayers helped them make their mortgage payments and build equity?

This is, in a word, unseemly. There’s a better way to do this.

Like any employee, lawmakers should get receipts and be reimbursed for what they actually spend. The Legislature should set a spending cap on members’ personal expenses — and perhaps the per diem rate would be a good guideline. If members spent less than the full amount, the savings would go to the state treasury. They could even hold a competition for the most frugal.